Chuck Hagel: The Asia pivot is still on

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel

Brendan Smialowski / AFP/Getty Images

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator and Vietnam War Army sergeant, got his turn as defense secretary at an unenviable moment: a period of shrinking budgets, when tough choices among priorities can't be dodged.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator and Vietnam War Army sergeant, got his turn as defense secretary at an unenviable moment: a period of shrinking budgets, when tough choices among priorities can't be dodged.

Russian troops are massing menacingly on Ukraine's eastern border. The civil war in Syria is still raging, and 33,000 American troops fight on in Afghanistan. So where is Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel headed this week? To Hawaii — for a meeting with defense ministers from Asia, the region the Obama administration still considers its top foreign policy priority.

"Asia is one of the great success stories of the world," Hagel told me in an interview in his Pentagon office last week. "There is really today in Asia, in the Asia Pacific region, no open conflict."

"What's happened in Ukraine is a good example of brute force, of hard power," he said. "[And] hard-power conflict is always going to be with us."

But the administration remains convinced that deploying "soft power" tools of diplomacy, security cooperation and trade can often prevent hard-power showdowns. In that realm, Hagel said, "Asia-Pacific has pointed the way," he said.

After his meetings in Hawaii, which will include soft-power sessions on trade and disaster relief as well as military cooperation, Hagel will head to Japan and China for thornier talks about security problems, including territorial conflict over islands in the East China Sea.

Hagel's trip is a deliberate statement to those who think the crisis in Ukraine means the administration should delay its long-promised pivot to Asia or even pivot back toward Europe again.

That won't happen, Hagel insists. The U.S. will stand by its NATO allies in any confrontation with Russia, he said, but there's no plan to increase American troop strength in Europe.

The White House has ballyhooed its actions in ordering U.S. military units to bolster Eastern Europe after Russia's seizure of Crimea. But in fact, they haven't amounted to much: 18 fighter jets deployed to Poland and Lithuania, an extended Black Sea cruise for a Navy destroyer and about 300,000 prepackaged field rations (but no weapons) for the Ukrainian armed forces.

U.S. support for Ukraine "has not pulled any assets away" from Asia or any other region, Hagel noted.

That minimalist military response to the Ukraine crisis stems mostly from Obama's desire to avoid escalating the conflict. Even if Russia moves troops into eastern Ukraine, Hagel said, the United States is staying out.

But it also reflects the Obama administration's larger map: Eastern Europe isn't among the president's top priorities. Asia still is.

Ironically, though, after spending much of his first year as secretary of Defense reassuring European and Middle Eastern leaders that a "rebalance" toward Asia didn't mean neglect for other parts of the world, Hagel now finds himself reassuring Asians that the pivot is still on.

That's partly because of skepticism from some of his own people. This month, Assistant Secretary of Defense Katrina McFarland told a conference that budget cuts meant the pivot was being reconsidered "because, candidly, it can't happen." (She retracted the comment, presumably under pressure from her bosses, later the same day.) And last week, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. Samuel Locklear, told Congress that he didn't have enough submarines or landing craft to carry out his missions adequately.

Questions about the global perception of U.S. military retrenchment, in Asia or anywhere else, get Hagel agitated.

"We've got over 330,000 personnel deployed in the Asia-Pacific, 180 ships, over 2,000 aircraft," he said. "It's the largest combatant command we have in the world.

"I'm always a bit amused, perplexed, by people who say we're retreating from the world," he continued. "Where are we retreating from?" And he ticks off all the areas where U.S. military forces are active — not only East Asia and Europe and Afghanistan but the Middle East and Africa as well.

So yes, the budget plan Hagel sent to Congress this month calls for a smaller Army, a smaller Marine Corps, fewer planes and fewer ships than planned. But the Defense secretary says that shouldn't matter.

The answer, he said, is to do more with less, both by helping friendly countries improve their own defenses and by relying on quality instead of quantity. The troops and ships and aircraft the United States deploys may be fewer than before, but they are more capable than their predecessors.

On the big, long-term picture, Obama and Hagel are right: Asia and the Pacific are the most important region for U.S. interests. In trade, for example, U.S. exports to Asia are significantly larger than exports to Europe. Europe has NATO to keep the peace; Asia, without an equivalent regional organization, still relies on the

U.S. Navy. And China is a dynamic, rising power — unlike Russia, which may be dangerous but isn't growing in most other ways.

"That's the big one," Hagel said. "We've really got to pay attention to that relationship and get it right."

But other crises and other regions keep getting in the way, as do the fiscal pressures that are pushing the defense budget downward with support from Republicans as well as Democrats.

Hagel, a former Republican senator and Vietnam War Army sergeant, got his turn as Defense secretary at an unenviable moment: a period of shrinking budgets, when tough choices among priorities can't be dodged.

This month, that means convincing leaders in Asia that the United States really can do more with less, and that it won't be distracted from its focus on the Pacific by hard-power crises in Ukraine or anywhere else.